A life of experiences

Watching the Tour de France

One moment you don’t complete any bucket list items for half a year, the next you complete two in a just couple of days..

Yesterday I went to see the circus that is the Tour de France, the world’s biggest cycling event, pass through the small city of Montfoort, which is about 40 minutes from where I live. Even though the major part of the three-week stage race is held in France, as the name suggests, the first couple of stages are often held in various other countries. This year, the Tour started in Holland, and I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go and watch.

I asked my father to come with me, and as he’s an avid cycler himself and had never seen the Tour de France in person either, we made a nice little father-son event out of it.

Before the cyclers pass (which they do in less than a minute), a caravan consisting of promotional vehicles pass through and hand out lots of stuff from the multitude of sponsors from the different teams. That’s really fun to see to as there are a lot of unusual vehicles in this caravan.

Once the caravan passed we waited for the cyclists to come through. Lucky for us some of them escaped the peloton, so at least we could enjoy them passing through a little longer, but as they’re doing around 45 km/h (which isn’t actually even that fast, they reach much higher speeds at the end of the stage) it was over rather quickly. Still, we had a great day out and I thoroughly enjoyed attending such a large sports event in person.

Even though this item is done, I will surely try and attend some more major sports events in the future as I thoroughly enjoyed this outing. Next chance will be next year as the Giro d’Italia also passes through the Netherlands. And I still want to see the football World or European Cup in person, as well as either the summer or the winter Olympics.. To be continued!

ABOUT

Hi, I'm Bas! Welcome to my personal weblog, where I keep track of all the things I want to do before I kick the bucket, and the actions I take in order to achieve them. I hope this will inspire you to do something similar. Life's too short!